Handmade books with buttonhole binding

Handmade Books with Watercolour Paper Pages

This month I’ve been having a bit of a flurry on making handmade books filled with watercolour paper. This button-hole style of binding is a fairly new addition to my repertoire. The previous books I make with this stitch used a variation of the standard stitch, but this time around I’m conforming to the norm, and I’ve enjoyed getting more familiar with this style of binding.

For both of these examples I used small hardback books I bought from the local charity shop here in Cabanas. I removed the pages, and cut out the centre part of the spine to create the button-hole, then covered the books with hand-printed paper I created with my Gelli-Arts plate.

Button-Hole Binding Book with Red Cover

My brother had given me some dried leaves from the trees in his garden, and I used these to create the pattern on this cover. While I was rustling through my printed papers, I found some of the linocut prints of sardine cans I’d printed on mulberry paper last year.

The great thing about this paper is that you can make it semi-transparent by using pouring medium, so you can still see some of the pattern on the cover paper underneath.

The brand of medium I’m using is Liquitex, and it’s not cheap, but my eagle-eyed other half found a 946ml bottle for sale in the same charity shop, and it’s lasted me a couple of years already, and is much less sticky than Modge-Podge.

Button-Hole Binding Book with Turquoise Cover

I really love this paper I created. The base is black and various shades of blue, and then I splashed on some metallic gold paint which really goes well with that colour combination.

I was a bit loathed to use this paper because I couldn’t really remember the exact process I used to create it, and I was so pleased with how it turned out. But in the end I relented, and put it to good use.

As you can see in the photo above, my hand is bandaged. Luckily it’s the left hand I broke and not my sketching hand, but it does mean that for now, my bookbinding has come to a screeching halt.

I think I could still manage to make some new printed papers though…worth a try! I’m going to order some more Mulberry paper (my fave to use with my gel plate), and some wet strength tissue paper – which I haven’t used before, and see if I can create some more of this black and turquoise patterned paper.

I like experimenting with different bookbinding styles, and you can see my handmade book output summarised in this blog post: